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 German politician of that age which is known to the English public is confessedly unsatisfactory from the political point of view. Miss Winkworth, when she translated Niebuhr's life, regretted in her preface that "the account given in it of his public career was very incomplete, and by no means one that enabled the reader to perceive the relation in which Niebuhr stood to his times." Yet Niebuhr's character is so interesting, even when a good part of it is left in the shade, that two or three editions of the book have been called for. Let some one put by the side of it a portrait executed on the same scale of the other great scholar-statesman of Prussia, W. von Humboldt, the great educational reformer and founder of the University of Berlin. The life of Arndt, with its wanderings and adventures, might be made even popular. Blücher, Gneisenau, and Yorck, are striking military figures. Scharnhorst is perhaps more important than any of these, but his reserved and unimpassioned character is not much adapted for biography, at least if we may judge from the admitted failure of Klippel's attempt; but perhaps the rising historian, Max Lehmann, who promises a new life of Scharnhorst, will teach us better. The age too is rich in interesting specimens of more or less perverted character. Such are Dalberg, prince primate of the Confederation of the Rhine, Johannes Müller, Gentz, the first king of Würtemberg.

Who, in all this assemblage of characters, holds the regal position? I think it is the proud Reichsfreiherr, Karl von Stein, greater than any by the breadth of his views and the commanding force of his character, even if we should grant that Hardenberg might claim to rival him in the sum of his achievements. Our author closes his work with an elaborate comparison between the two statesmen, in which, as was natural, and perhaps proper, in a life of Hardenberg, somewhat more than justice is done to him, and somewhat less to Stein. The great superiority of Stein lies in the influence he exerted outside Prussia upon Germany as a whole. In 1813 it was the custom to speak of him as emperor of Germany; and the phrase was a happy way of marking that, as our author says, he was "the first and grandest representative of the German idea." Who else could write as early as 1812 what Stein wrote to Count Münster? — "I am sorry your Excellency suspects a Prussian in me and betrays a Hanoverian in yourself. I have but one fatherland, and that is Germany; and as under the old Constitution I belonged to Germany alone, and not to any part of Germany, so to Germany alone, and not to any part of it, I am devoted with my whole heart." It is the strangest ignorance which pictures this great-hearted man — who had his life in large and simple ideas, and who has been called Germany's political Luther — merely as a successful legislator on land questions.

If we made a commencement by becoming familiar with the lives of a few of these men, we should find the fog which now hides German politics from our view insensibly dissipated, and I believe, also, we should be astonished at the richness, variety, and interest of the scene which would be disclosed.

 

 

knew nothing of this dire announcement, though it was in every one of the newspapers published in Chicago that day. We were full of curiosity about this wonderful city that had sprung up like Jonah's gourd; and as we drove through its busy thoroughfares — the huge blocks of buildings looking like the best parts of Glasgow indefinitely extended — and as we saw the smoky sky over our head streaked in every direction with a black, rectangular spider's web of telegraph wires — and as we caught glimpses at the end of the long thoroughfares of the tall masts of ships — we knew that we had indeed reached the great commercial capital of the far West. And, indeed, we very speedily found that the genius of this big, eager, ostentatious place was too strong for us. We began to revel in the sumptuousness of the vast and garishly furnished hotels; we wanted more gilding, more marble, more gaudy